While you can certainly run an entire adventure within a single session, chances are that many of your adventures will span at least two sessions, if not more. It doesn’t matter why an adventure lasts for more than one session; what matters is how you keep the adventure flowing from one session to the next.
Tales from Walt’s Table
I once ran the first half of an adventure right before we took a month-long break for the holiday season. We’d planned on getting back togeth-er afttogeth-er New Year’s, but unfortunate circumstances doubled the length of the break. As the game had ended on a cliffhanger in the middle of an investigation, I decided to provide a little help to jumpstart the session.
When we finally got to play, I handed my players a sheet listing all of the clues that they’d discovered so far. It turned out to be quite handy and the players enjoyed wrapping up the adventure. Afterwards, one of them admitted to me that he was really lost during the first adventure, but seeing all the clues together in black and white made things click for him. If I hadn’t made that handout, the adventure might have dragged on
for another session or two.
It’s nice to think players hang on your every word and spend the time between sessions determining their next moves (and it can happen), but it’s more likely that real life is going to take up most of their time. If I had a quarter for every time a player showed up at a session and said, “So where were we again?” I’d be a wealthy man.
Pacing
Pacing is one of the most important tools of story management. Proper pacing ensures that your players enjoy the game session from start to finish, with little time spent spinning wheels or dragging out scenes. Remember that session where the players were stumped and argued about which course of action to take for three hours? Remember that insignificant battle which took a whole session to re-solve because those stubborn kobolds just wouldn’t die? Or that adventure which was supposed to fill three sessions but barely filled one because you didn’t create enough encounters along the way? Bad pacing makes sessions less fun.
Even for experienced GMs, pacing can be difficult to manage properly. What works for one group may not work for another (and your group changes every time a new player joins or someone can’t make it) and what works for one game system may not work for another. Here are a few tips on how to keep your pac-ing on track:
• Establish your actual session time—If your game session is scheduled from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. but you don’t really sit down and play until it’s closer to 6:00, then your actual session time is four hours, not five.
Danger Ahead!
If you don’t prepare adequately for a session, pacing problems can end it prematurely. I once played in a modern fantasy campaign where an extra-dimensional gate opened up in the middle of the city. The GM had only prepped one step ahead: He expected us to spend a session examining the portal, taking readings, and doing research, so he hadn’t decided what was on the other side of the portal yet. You can guess what happened next.
Within minutes of learning about the portal, our group loaded up a mini-van, headed to the site, asked the mayor for permission to enter the por-tal, and drove right through it. All of this took a whopping five minutes of real time. All the GM could do was sheepishly admit that he hadn’t planned that far ahead, and the session was over before the cheese on
our pizza had cooled.
• Give yourself a release valve on the back end—I like to have a half-hour buffer in case something drags during the game, so for a four-half-hour session I plan on three and a half hours.
• Employ a session goal—Knowing what you want the PCs to accomplish by the end of the session goes a long way towards keeping them on track to get there. This goes hand in hand with watching the clock, below.
• Watch the clock—I can’t tell you the number of times I thought a battle only took half an hour only to look up at the clock and see that it was closer to an hour and a half. Check the time.
• Note hard scenes and soft scenes—Hard scenes are encounters that need to happen for the adventure to move forward. Soft scenes are fun and may reinforce the hard scenes, but ultimately they’re expendable. Add or delete soft scenes as necessary to slow down or speed up the session.
• Remind your players of things their PCs should recall—You likely remember little details from session to session because they’re in your notes, but real life intervening between sessions often means that players won’t. When players spend half the session struggling with a clue because they forgot a detail from three sessions ago, it’s no fun for anyone.
• Use the 10 minute rule—I usually only give my players a short time to debate a course of action, although it isn’t always 10 minutes. After that I start feeding them hints, refreshing their memories, or allowing them to use a PC ability to gain insight into the situation.
Maps
One of the most difficult things to manage, especially for improvisational GMs, is creating maps. It can be a chore, so much so that one of my main motivations for becoming a “story-oriented” GM was to get away from the work involved in designing dungeon crawls. No matter what genre of game you’re running, you’ll need to have an idea of how buildings, terrain, or vehicles are laid out, and that means you’ll need maps at some point.
Here are some tips to help reduce the workload associated with mapmaking:
• You don’t need to map out entire floor plans—Just map the areas where action is likely to take place.
• Use your memory, especially for scenes that don’t need a detailed map—You can probably recall the basic layout of a fast food joint, a bowling alley, a family restaurant, and an amusement park, and it’s easy enough to re-skin those to be more appropriate to your setting.
• Beg, borrow, and steal—A quick Google search can turn up a variety of floor plans. You can steal maps from adventures, as well as use plans from dedicated map supplements. Remember that modern games often involve old buildings, so that awesome country home you found in a 1920s Call of Cthulhu® scenario can easily become the beachfront home of an NPC in your modern-day espionage game.
• Recycle—Your group probably won’t care that you’ve used the same ballroom or space freighter three times, especially if you come up with some window dressing on the fly that differentiates them.